The second article is about the fact that liberals and even the military cannot bring themselves to call it like it is so they resort to clever mindless words like 'senseless' instead of using the phrase terrorist act to describe what took place at Fort Hood. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Our revisionist president weasels by suggesting his recent comment about 1967 borders was nothing new. (See 2 below.)
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Two thoughts why the Republicans lost a seat in a district where they should have won.
First, no doubt the third candidate took votes permitting the Democrat to win. Equally important, and maybe even more so, Republicans do a lousy job of countering despicable campaign ads based on lies and ones designed to create fear among the unwashed. But that is what the Republicans will be up against and if they cannot fight back then they deserve the dire results they and the nation will get by four more years of Obama. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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Dan Henninger and I are on the same page. Republicans are far better off than the liberal media and news folks would have us believe. First, Republicans are running against a president who is a loser, an empty suit with a record to prove it and second, Republicans must educate and focus voter attention on Obama's failed achievements.
The question is are Republicans capable of getting their act together and capable of doing what needs to be done?
A further problem Republicans have is the public does not trust them based on their own failed record. Republicans are responsible for so much about which they complain because they too spent like drunken sailors on shore leave and they too demonstrated utter disregard for ethical behaviour when they were in control.
It is not easy for normal fish to swim upstream but that is what any Republican candidate must do and if they cannot they should not even make the effort because it will simply divide and further weaken the party. (See 4, 4a and 4b below.)
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Dick
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1)Obama explains — and makes it worse
By Alan M. Dershowitz
The American president 's statement at a UK press conference reveals the underlying flaw in Obama's thinking about the conflict. Giving the Palestinians more than they asked for has made it impossible for the Palestinians to compromise
In his press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron in London on Wednesday, US President Barack Obama explained his thinking as to why he insisted that the first step in seeking a peaceful two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians must be an agreement by Israel to accept the 1967 borders with mutually agreed-upon land swaps.
Here is what the president said: "It is going to require wrenching compromise from both sides. In the last decade, when negotiators have talked about how to achieve that outcome, there have been typically four issues that have been raised. One is the issue of what would the territorial boundaries of a new Palestinian state look like. Number two: how could Israel feel confident that its security needs would be met? Number three: how would the issue of Palestinian refugees be resolved; and number four, the issue of Jerusalem. The last two questions are extraordinarily emotional. They go deep into how the Palestinians and the Jewish people think about their own identities. Ultimately they are going to be resolved by the two parties. I believe that those two issues can be resolved if there is the prospect and the promise that we can actually get to a Palestinian state and a secure Jewish state of Israel."
This recent statement clearly reveals the underlying flaw in Obama's thinking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is no way that Israel can agree to borders without the Palestinians also agreeing to give up any claim to a "right of return." As Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad Salaam once told me: each side has a major card to play and a major compromise to make; for Israel, that card is the West Bank, and the compromise is returning to the 1967 lines with agreed-upon adjustments and land swaps; for the Palestinians, that card is "the right of return," and the compromise is an agreement that the Palestinian refugees will be settled in Palestine and not in Israel; in other words, that there will be no right to "return" to Israel.
President Obama's formulation requires Israel to give up its card and to make a "wrenching compromise" by dismantling most of the West Bank settlements and ending its occupation of the West Bank. But it does not require the Palestinians to give up their card and to compromise on the right of return. That "extraordinarily emotional" issue is to be left to further negotiations only after the borders have been agreed to.
This temporal ordering — requiring Israel to give up the "territorial" card before the Palestinians even have to negotiate about the "return" card — is a non-starter for Israel and it is more than the Palestinians have privately asked for. Once again, President Obama, by giving the Palestinians more than they asked for, has made it difficult, if not impossible, for the Palestinians to compromise. Earlier in his administration, Obama insisted that Israel freeze all settlement building, despite the fact that the Palestinians had not demanded such action as a precondition to negotiating. He forced the Palestinians to impose that as a precondition, because no Palestinian leader could be seen as less pro-Palestinian than the American President. Now he's done it again, by not demanding that the Palestinians give up their right of return as a quid for Israel's quo of returning to the 1967 borders with agreed-upon land swaps.
So it's not so much what President Obama said; it's what he didn't say. It would have been so easy for the President to have made the following statement:
"I am asking each side to make a wrenching compromise that will be extraordinarily emotional and difficult. For Israel, this compromise must take the form of abandonment of its historic and Biblical claims to what it calls Judea and Samaria. This territorial compromise will require secure boundaries somewhat different than the 1967 lines that led to war. Resolution 242 of the Security Council recognized the need for changes in the 1967 lines that will assure Israel's security. Since 1967, demographic changes have occurred that will also require agreed-upon land swaps between Israel and the new Palestinian state. This territorial compromise will be difficult for Israel, but in the end it will be worthwhile, because it will assure that Israel will remain both a Jewish and a fully democratic state in which every resident is equal under the law.
"For the Palestinians, this compromise must take the form of a recognition that for Israel to continue to be the democratic state of the Jewish people, the Palestinian refugees and their descendants will have to be settled in Palestine. In other words, they will have a right to return, but to Palestine and not to Israel. This will be good both for Palestine and for Israel. For Palestine, it will assure that the new state will have the benefit of a large and productive influx of Palestinians from around the world. This Palestinian diaspora should want to help build an economically and politically viable Palestinian state. The Palestinian leadership must recognize, as I believe they do, that there will be no "right of return" of millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to Israel. Compensation can be negotiated both for those Palestinians who left Israel as a result of the 1948 wars and for those Jews who left Arab countries during and after that same period."
It's not too late for President Obama to "explain" that that is what he really meant when he declared that Israel must remain a Jewish state and that any Palestinian government that expects compromises from Israel must recognize that reality. Central to Israel's continued existence as the nation-state of the Jewish people is the Palestinian recognition that there can be no so-called "right of return" to Israel, and that the Palestinian leadership and people must acknowledge that Israel will continue to exist as the nation-state of the Jewish people within secure and recognized boundaries. Unless President Obama sends that clear message, not only to the Israelis but to the Palestinians as well, he will not move the peace process forward. He will move it backward.
The world's best known criminal lawyer, Alan Dershowitz is a six-time bestselling author and Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard Law School.
1a)Senseless’ seems easier than saying ‘jihad’
By Diana West
The Army honored a fallen hero of the Ft. Hood Jihad Massacre with a medal this week. Not, of course, that the Army describes the November 2009 attack in such meaningful terms. Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Hasan may have shouted "Allahu Akbar" (Arabic for "Allah is great") as he killed 14 and wounded more than two dozen; may have been in contact with jihad cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and frequented jihadist websites; may have had business cards proclaiming himself a "SoA" (Soldier of Allah); and may have created and presented an Islamically correct PowerPoint brief outlining reasons for jihad by Muslims within the U.S. Armed Forces, but no matter. His actions remain a total mystery to the U.S. Army.
To wit: "Although we may never know why it happened, we do know that heroic actions took place that day," Brig. Gen. Joseph DiSalvo said in presenting the Secretary of the Army Award for Valor to Joleen Cahill, widow of Michael Grant Cahill. Cahill is recognized as the first person to have tried to stop Hasan and the only civilian to have been killed by Hasan that day. "He will forever be a source of inspiration."
Alas, I have my doubts about the deputy commanding general of Ft. Hood. Despite overwhelming evidence that Hasan committed an act of jihad, DiSalvo -- like the Army, like the U.S. government -- looks the other way. "We may never know why" the Hasan attack happened, DiSalvo said without, apparently, turning red or rolling his eyes.
It's hard to overstate the impact of these words. In honoring the very last thing Cahill did on this Earth, the general pointedly chose to omit its significance. Like a potent spell, his words made all the context of the 62-year-old Cahill's valorous act -- charging Hasan with a chair as Hasan fired on the crowd -- disappear. Of course, the general's omission takes nothing away from Cahill's courage. It does, however, wrongly release the rest of us from our debt to Cahill. In treating Hasan's rampage as no more purposeful than a flood or a cougar attack, the general has also reduced Cahill's ultimate sacrifice to its most personal level; exemplary, admirable, but of no consequence beyond the scene, outside the circle. This is morally wrong. It was the general's duty to place Cahill's death in perspective, to impress upon both his loved ones and his fellow citizens that he died not only to stop a bloodletting but also in defense of liberty, then and now under jihadist attack.
In other words, the general flinched. No surprise there. Ft. Hood may have been a war zone that day but, with few exceptions (Texas Republicans Rep. John Carter and Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchinson and John Cornyn are pressing to see Purple Hearts awarded), neither our military nor our government has the courage to admit it.
There is a ripple effect. This Memorial Day, by U.S. government reckoning, by U.S. military non-fiat, the Ft. Hood fallen do not rate remembrance as war dead. As a result, there have been no Purple Hearts awarded to military dead and wounded (as there were to casualties of the 9/11 attacks), no combat death benefits awarded to their survivors, no recognition of Hasan's jihad. Indeed, as the general says, we may never even know why they died.
This is just the way our leadership wants it -- "senseless," as President Obama put it, describing another 2009 jihadist attack the U.S. government refuses to recognize as an act of war, this one in Little Rock in which Pvt. William Long was killed and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula was severely wounded outside a military recruiting station. The trial, which begins in July, is currently subject to a tug-of-war, almost literally, between the lawyers and defendant Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad. Prosecutor Larry Jegley is determined to prosecute Muhammad as "nothing but a street thug" accused of "just a drive-by shooting," defense attorneys want Muhammad to plead insanity, while Muhammad, a Muslim convert who may have studied with a jihadist imam in Yemen where he drew the attention of the FBI, is pleading, strenuously, to be tried as a sane, confessed jihadist. Like the US military, like the White House, the court seems to be pushing jihad, kicking and screaming in this case, down the memory hole.
Which makes you wonder: By next Memorial Day, who will remember?
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2)Obama's Revisionist History
By Philip Averbuck
Always a master at misdirection and diversion, President Obama and his flacks have taken pains to assert that his new "1967 lines as a basis for peace" formulation for Israel's borders is, hey, "nothing new."
There's a grain of truth in this argument. But a mountain of lie. The lie renders the truth utterly irrelevant. Let's take a little walk down memory lane of prior US administrations, and see just how fraudulent it really is:
Nixon
When the Nixon Administration considered the situation (the 1970 "Rogers Plan"), the objective was to wean Egypt away from the Soviet orbit, and dealt only with Egypt's territorial losses to Israel in 1967. In case Barack hadn't noticed, these territories were completely returned to Egypt by 1982, pursuant to the Camp David Accords of 1978. The Rogers plan did not address any of the Jordanian territories (Judea and Samaria, so-called "Palestine") captured by Israel in 1967, much less even suggesting a "Palestinian" state. That would have been seen as an outrageously provocative and unfriendly act by then-King Hussein, a US ally, who was at that time obliged to respond with extreme force to an attempted "Palestinian" putsch against him; he drowned the putsch in the blood of at least 5,000 Arafat loyalists.
Carter
When the Carter Administration considered the problem, Egypt had already broken with the USSR, and had independently approached Israel to seek peace talks. The Carter Administration did little more than put a heavy thumb on the scale to ensure a favorable result for Egypt, which by any normal reading walked away from the table with negotiating windfall after windfall. However, the Camp David Accords also did not address the disposition of the Jordanian territories captured by Israel, except to declare that they should receive a period of "autonomy" before their final status was determined.
It is important to note that, at the time of the Nixon and Carter diplomatic efforts, the two strongest Muslim nations in the Middle East (Turkey and Iran) were both strong American allies, and both semi-open allies of Israel. This reality has turned 180 degrees today, to the point that Turkey's membership in NATO is an open scandal and an absurdity, as it is now weaving together its operational activities with Iran. Barack may have not noticed the dozens of kissy-face visits of Erdogan to Iran or Ahmadinejad to Turkey in recent years (and many more high-level military and security visits), but that is to his everlasting discredit. Israel has noticed them, of course. The new anti-Israel Iranian/Turkish alliance alone makes all of the earlier State Department calculations utterly irrelevant.
Reagan
The Reagan Administration started in 1982 to seek territorial concessions from Israel, but that position was soon abandoned as new Sec. of State George Schultz moved up the learning curve and reviewed the devastating intelligence and weaponry captured by Israel from the PLO in Lebanon that summer. Not to mention the unprecedented trouncing that Israel laid on Syria, which had been supplied with the latest Soviet weaponry. Shortly after Israel's Operation Peace for Galilee in Lebanon, President Reagan addressed the nation on Sept 1, 1982 -- you be the judge how similar this sounds to Barack Hussein Obama in 2011:
I have personally followed and supported Israel's heroic struggle for survival, ever since the founding of the State of Israel 34 years ago. In the pre-1967 borders Israel was barely 10 miles wide at its narrowest point. The bulk of Israel's population lived within artillery range of hostile Arab armies. I am not about to ask Israel to live that way again.
...
Beyond the transition period, as we look to the future of the West Bank and Gaza, it is clear to me that peace cannot be achieved by the formation of an independent Palestinian state in those territories, nor is it achievable on the basis of Israeli sovereignty or permanent control over the West Bank and Gaza. So, the United States will not support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and we will not support annexation or permanent control by Israel.
There is, however, another way to peace. The final status of these lands must, of course, be reached through the give and take of negotiations. But it is the firm view of the United States that self-government by the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza in association with Jordan offers the best chance for a durable, just, and lasting peace.
So, to summarize: the Reagan Administration firmly rejected the idea of Israel returning to the "wasp-waist" 1967 lines; firmly rejected a Palestinian state; and supported the idea of Jordan negotiating with Israel for the final territorial disposition. No Palestinian state.
Bush I
The first Bush Administration was indeed set to pressure Israel in 1990, but Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait -- wildly supported by the "Palestinian" Arabs -- derailed them. However, even the unfriendly-to-Israel patrician George H.W. Bush rejected a Palestinian state, telling Arab journalists in 1991:
Q. What do you mean by political rights to Palestinian people in your speech?
The President. About political rights? Listen, there will not be peace until the whole question of where the Palestinians have a right to be is taken care of. And some say "state." It's not been our position in favor of the state, and there we differ with many of our Arab friends.
Clinton
It in fact isn't until the sixth (6th) US President following the 6 Day War (Clinton) that the idea was finally floated to give the "Palestinians" a state with borders approximating those of West Bank Jordan on June 4, 1967. At the same time, the PLO under Yasser Arafat had made a tactical decision to peacefully engage Israel on the surface, while secretly maintaining a strategy based on the mass murder of Jewish civilians. This clear but unrealistic strategy was based on the assumption that enough "independent" non-PLO, arms-length terror-bombings and shootings would bring Israel to its knees where entire Arab armies had failed. The strategy culminated in "the second intifada" of September 2000 (which was finally militarily liquidated in April 2002), leaving even the notoriously concessionist Clinton (who had invited Arafat to the White House more than any other foreign official) completely empty-handed, and embarrassed.
Therefore, it is arguable that Obama is indeed following the precedent of one (1) US President, Bill Clinton...a precedent which collapsed in blood and chaos.
Bush II
Finally, we have the 2nd Bush Administration. There has already been a lot of discussion about George W. Bush's letter of April 14, 2004, to Ariel Sharon, essentially endorsing the annexation of "already existing major Israeli population centers," which has been studiously ignored by Obama & Co. Secondly, it is important to note that the same letter placed as precedent to any Israel compromises the following conditions for the Palestinians:
Palestinians must undertake an immediate cessation of armed activity and all acts of violence against Israelis anywhere, and all official Palestinian institutions must end incitement against Israel. The Palestinian leadership must act decisively against terror, including sustained, targeted, and effective operations to stop terrorism and dismantle terrorist capabilities and infrastructure. Palestinians must undertake a comprehensive and fundamental political reform that includes a strong parliamentary democracy and an empowered prime minister.
Needless to say, every single one of those conditions have gone wretchedly unfulfilled.
But there's more. Just as the new Turkey/Iran axis requires an entirely new calculation for both Israel and the US, so the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza (16 months after the Bush letter), which has resulted in a Hamastan-Gaza serving as a missile-firing range requires yet another calculation.
And that's not all: the post-2006 buildup of Lebanon with Iranian missiles (estimated to be at least 60,000) has to result in yet another calculation. And neither of those calculations can result in greater demands of Israel, unless they are in fact blatantly hostile demands.
So, what else can go wrong since 1967? Ohhhhh, I don't know...How 'bout the overthrow of the one neighbor (Mubarak's Egypt) with which Israel had a relatively solid peace treaty, and its replacement with a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government? Does that development call for greater pressure on and territorial compromise from Israel?
But wait, there's more. I haven't even mentioned Iran's nuclear missile program, and its openly proclaimed plan of genocide against Israel, have I?
And I haven't even mentioned the recent Fatah/Hamas alliance, the prevention of which was the central and explicit objective of the Rabin/Clinton strategy since 1993. (A strategy which had drearily failed, on other grounds, long ago.)
Is there any small country on earth that should face such a crescendo of deadly threats and be pressured to give up its territory? What kind of "friend" would do such a thing? If Hussein Obama had even a trace of sympathy for Israel, he'd be threatening the new Egyptian government every single day that, should they abrogate the Camp David Accords, the United States will materially support Israel's recapture of the Sinai, not to mention cutting off our billions in aid to Egypt.
"Nothing new," says Obama, and his brain-wiped bootlickers like the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg join the chorus. Well, in fact the entire region has had so many new -- and purely hostile -- changes since 1979, that it qualifies as nothing less than malicious madness to pretend that a "let bygones be bygones" approach will lead to more peace, security, and justice.
It is beyond crystal-clear: for Israel to even approximate the 1967 border lines will give such encouragement, high terrain and favorable borders to its bloodthirsty enemies that Neville Chamberlain's work "on behalf of" Czechoslovakia will be re-examined as wildly successful in comparison.
Nothing new? To quote the great Herman Cain: Obama is treating us as if we're stupid. Well, are we?
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3)The Ryan Medicare plan needs a clearer and more populist defense.
By KARL ROVE
Five and a half weeks after House Republicans passed their budget, Democrats and liberal pundits have decided it is political kryptonite that will fatally weaken the GOP.
Their evidence is Tuesday's special election in New York's 26th district, where Democrat Kathy Hochul defeated Republican Jane Corwin for a vacant congressional seat. This is not just any congressional district, but one carried by George W. Bush and John McCain in the last two presidential elections, and one represented for 58 years by a Republican.
Liberals can barely contain their glee. MSNBC's Ed Schultz said the outcome left "Republicans scrambling" while the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne said "it will petrify" Republicans. Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.) said it proved "Democrats have the keys to drive the budget debate and play offense in 2012."
Most, but not all, of this is wishful thinking. Ms. Hochul won a plurality (47%) of the votes, not a majority, getting only one percentage point more than Barack Obama as he was losing the district in 2008. Not exactly a compelling performance.
Democrats won only because a third-party candidate—self-proclaimed tea partier Jack Davis—spent a reported $3 million of his own money. Absent Mr. Davis as a spoiler—he got 9% of the vote—Democrats would never have made a serious bid for this district, nor won if they did. Ironically, Mr. Davis ran for the same seat in the last three elections as a Democrat. This year he ran as a populist conservative.
Still the question remains: Did the Medicare reforms proposed by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and supported by Ms. Corwin play a role in the outcome? The answer is yes, though not with the blunt force and trauma some Democrats are claiming.
Polling by American Crossroads (an independent expenditure group with which I'm associated) showed that while Ms. Hochul's Medicare attacks galvanized Democrats, they swayed few independents. Among voters who had an unfavorable view of Ms. Corwin, just 20% focused on Medicare, with most Democrats already voting for Ms. Hochul.
A larger percentage of those voters with an unfavorable opinion of Ms. Corwin's campaign—26%—were concerned about an ugly on-camera incident involving her chief of staff yelling at Mr. Davis in a parking lot. These voters felt Mr. Davis was being unfairly harassed. The defection of these overwhelmingly Republican and independent voters doomed Ms. Corwin.
That's not to say Medicare didn't play an important role. Ms. Hochul pummeled Ms. Corwin over it. The GOP candidate did not respond with TV ads until the campaign's closing week, and only then with an ad many voters thought lacked credibility. It alleged Ms. Hochul had endorsed Medicare and Social Security cuts that she claimed she had not.
An earlier, more aggressive explanation and defense of the Ryan plan would have turned the issue: 55% in the Crossroads survey agreed with GOP arguments for the Ryan reforms while just 36% agreed with the Democrats' arguments against it.
Next year, Republicans must describe their Medicare reforms plainly, set the record straight vigorously when Democrats demagogue, and go on the attack. Congressional Republicans—especially in the House—need a political war college that schools incumbents and challengers in the best way to explain, defend and attack on the issue of Medicare reform. They have to become as comfortable talking about Medicare in the coming year as they did in talking about health-care reform last year.
There needs to be preparation and self-education, followed by extensive town halls, outreach meetings, visits to senior citizen centers, and the use of every available communications tool to get the reform message across.
A good starting point is Mr. Ryan's message from his speech at the Economic Club of Chicago that his Medicare reform package "makes no changes for those in or near retirement, and offers future generations a strengthened Medicare program they can count on, with guaranteed coverage options, less help for the wealthy, and more help for the poor and the sick."
The populist note is especially important: When he starts receiving Medicare, Bill Gates should bear a greater share of his health-care costs than the less healthy or less wealthy.
Defense, no matter how robust, well-informed and persistent, is insufficient. Republicans must also go on offense. Democratic nonchalance towards Medicare's bankruptcy in 2024 and the crushing debt it will leave for our children gives the GOP the chance to depict Democrats as tone deaf, irresponsible and reckless. The country can't afford Democratic leaders who simply order the orchestra to play louder as the Titanic tilts and begins to slide under.
Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of "Courage and Consequence" (Threshold Editions, 2010).
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
3a)The GOP's New York Spanking
Republicans need to go on offense against Mediscare
We hope Republicans don't believe their own spin that their candidate lost Tuesday's special House election mainly because of a third party candidate or because New York state is hostile territory. They lost because Democrats ran a Mediscare campaign, and the GOP candidate lacked an adequate response.
Democrat Kathy Hochul, the Erie County clerk, won 47% of the vote in a district that was one of only four in New York that John McCain won in 2008. She ran a one-issue campaign against Paul Ryan's Medicare reform, and she had the advantage of not having voted for ObamaCare's $500 billion in Medicare cuts. Ms. Hochul also caught a big, late assist from Newt Gingrich and his own-goal attack on Mr. Ryan's plan.
Republican Jane Corwin, a state legislator, won 43% after saying she would have voted for the Ryan plan but then devoted most of her time to deploring Mediscare tactics rather than fighting back. Ms. Corwin admitted Monday that she let the attacks go unanswered until the last minute, and the House GOP campaign committee was remarkably unprepared for what everyone knew was coming.
An imposter on the tea party line received 9%, but the most important political story is that Ms. Corwin lost the economically downscale voters who swung to the GOP in 2010. Those voters are susceptible to unrebutted claims that they might lose health-care coverage in retirement.
The GOP consultant class is already taking the media's lead and urging the GOP to flee Mr. Ryan's plan and abandon any serious entitlement reform. But a GOP panic will only compound the losses. All but four House Republicans have already voted for the plan, and they will see Mediscare ads from here to November 2012 no matter what they say. They need a better explanation for the Ryan plan, but more than that they need a strategy to go on offense.
One place to start is by attacking the Democratic plan to cut Medicare via political rationing. Mr. Ryan's budget had the virtue of embarrassing President Obama's spend-more initial budget, and the White House responded by proposing to increase the power of the new Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) to decide what, and how much, Medicare will pay for. The ObamaCare bill goes to great lengths to shelter this 15-member, unelected board from Congressional review, with the goal of letting these bureaucrats throw granny over the cliff if Medicare isn't reformed. Yet few Americans know anything about IPAB or its rationing intentions.
More broadly, reformers can't let Democrats separate Medicare from the larger issue of exploding debt and economic prosperity. Republicans will lose an entitlement debate every time if it's only about austerity. They need to link Medicare reform, and spending cuts generally, to faster growth and rising incomes. The greatest threat to Medicare and Social Security is a debt-laden, slow-growth economy like the current 1.8% recovery.
The biggest failing of House and Senate Republicans this year has been their emphasis on budget accounting more than growth economics. This is understandable given the tea party's 2010 electoral influence, the magnitude of the deficits, and Mr. Obama's fiscal abdication. But it has too often made the GOP come across as bookkeepers.
Assuming they get some spending cuts and budget reform as part of the debt-limit talks, Republicans would be wise to focus most of their legislative attention on raising growth to 4% or 5% of GDP. This is the least the U.S. should be growing after the deep recession of 2007-2009, and the failure to do so is Mr. Obama's biggest political vulnerability.
The tragedy of the modern entitlement state is that it has become too big to afford but also too entrenched to easily reform. (See Greece, riots in the streets.) Republicans can't give up the cause, but New York is a warning that they need to
pursue it as part of a larger agenda that restores the American middle-class's economic hope.
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4)The Building Blocks of a GOP Agenda Leading governors and members of Congress know them: entitlement reform, fiscal restoration and lightly taxed long-term economic growth.
By DANIEL
The "smart money" says Barack Obama is cruising to re-election because of Republican disarray. Pick up a paper, visit a blog, turn on the TV or radio, and reports of Republican misadventure will engulf you:
Mitch Daniels just said no. Newt Gingrich says too much. On Tuesday, voters in New York's normally Republican congressional district 26, near Buffalo and Rochester, "shocked" the political world by electing a Democrat. The smart money now says NY-26 means that if the Republicans run on Paul Ryan's Medicare reform proposal, they risk losing the presidency.
The smart money is often stupid.
Standing against the tornadoes of political spin isn't easy. But if the Republicans will step back from these storms, they'll see that the GOP prospect is in better shape than they think. A clear and defensible agenda for 2012 is being assembled outside the presidential campaigns.
One Republican analyst of the GOP's NY-26 defeat said the takeaway is: "2010 is over." This is the opposite of the truth. That 2010 vote was the American public screaming at their elected officials to stop the country from hurtling toward fiscal and economic calamity.
They're still screaming. A Washington Post poll out yesterday buttressed this core concern: Voters across the spectrum say their prime worry is what happens if Congress expands American indebtedness beyond $14.3 trillion. In their wisdom, the people suspect what will happen won't be good. Their vote in 2010 was the basis for a genuine Republican reform movement.
Normally when the presidential entrepreneurs take over our politics, the parties recede. This means the parties end up yoked to whatever random, variable ideas their nominee patches together. The smoke-filled room has been replaced by hot-air trial balloons.
Something new is happening this time. Since 2009, the Republican Party's best members have been constructing the building blocks of an agenda distinct from what Barack Obama represents.
The most significant figure in this process is not Paul Ryan but Chris Christie, New Jersey's charismatic governor.
Before Chris Christie, nearly every Republican would bend to the conventional wisdom of doing deals with the public unions, raising taxes, and rolling debt obligations into the future. Chris Christie blew the whistle on this nonsolution. He gave the Republicans the courage to say the most basic truth in American politics: We are going broke. Chris Christie made the sources of fighting fiscal ruin popular, even cool.
Along with Mr. Christie, Govs. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, John Kasich of Ohio and Scott Walker of Wisconsin have made fiscal restoration the cornerstone of the new Republican Party. Mitch Daniels's appeal was that he was a member of this new movement.
Fiscal rectitude, of course, can be its own form of conventional wisdom, expressed by raising taxes to "balance" the budget. Last month, another significant Republican derided the tax-and-balance solution. The man who called this "root canal economics" is the Speaker of the House. This too is new.
When it came to pass that John Boehner would assume the speakership, one would have thought the party was inheriting Millard Fillmore. Instead, Mr. Boehner has been using his office to lift another building block atop the GOP's restored fiscal foundation—the primacy of the private sector.
Leading governors and members of Congress know them: entitlement reform, fiscal restoration and lightly taxed long-term economic growth
A speech Mr. Boehner gave last month to the Economic Club of New York was an important defining statement. Mr. Boehner ran straight at what is probably the most unshakable conventional wisdom in politics: "The big myth of the current budget debate is the notion that in order to balance the budget, we have to raise taxes. The truth is we will never balance the budget and rid our children of debt unless we cut spending and have real economic growth. And we will never have real economic growth if we raise taxes on those in America who create jobs." No speaker has so categorically repudiated using taxes to bail out Washington.
To Paul Ryan fell the job of reshaping the heaviest stone of all—entitlements. For saying the entitlement status quo is fake and false, Mr. Ryan has earned ridicule from the current president and derision from Republican pragmatists who say he's destroying the party by attempting Medicare reform.
But without entitlement reform, these other GOP building blocks—fiscal restoration and lightly taxed long-term economic growth—are unstable. Notwithstanding the results in suburban Buffalo, an electorate that understands the danger of $14.3 trillion in debt surely can be made to understand by November 2012 the risk of many trillions more in future entitlement obligations.
The campaigns of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman no doubt will still try to fashion a campaign from whole cloth. Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor, looks for now to be closest to building out from the structure of economic reform that the Republican governors, the House speaker and the Wisconsin congressman have been creating for their party.
This is still presidential politics. Some people will never vote for any of this, and the person atop the ticket matters. But Republicans despondent about an election 18 months off need to see they are not fighting the incumbent with nothing. A coherent opposition exists, one that fits with an electorate justifiably anxious about the future of what was once the world's most prosperous private economy.
4a)Cool Hand Harry
Senate Democrats refuse to pass a budget
Paul Newman's famous line after bluffing his way to a big poker pot in "Cool Hand Luke" was: "Sometimes nothing can be a pretty cool hand." That's as good a description as any of the Senate Democratic strategy for attacking the $14.3 trillion federal debt. Do nothing.
Lest voters forget, Democrats still run the Senate, or at least they do when they want to filibuster House Republican reform bills. When it comes to their core responsibility under the law of passing a budget resolution, they are A.W.O.L. Budget Chairman Kent Conrad can't get a bill through his own committee, much less onto the Senate floor. Mr. Conrad says he wants to "defer" to the negotiations between the White House and Republicans. The truth is that his troops don't want to go on record voting for the tax increases that are the Democratic default for every fiscal problem.
The contrast between Senate Democrats and House Republicans on the budget could hardly be sharper. No matter what one thinks of Paul Ryan's House budget priorities, no one can deny that it's a detailed tax and spending outline that makes difficult choices and would reduce the debt by $5 trillion over 10 years.
Mr. Conrad had proclaimed that he would cut $4 trillion from the baseline deficit over the next decade, with half of the savings from unspecified spending cuts and the other half from tax increases. Perhaps Mr. Conrad discovered it isn't so easy finding $2 trillion in spending cuts without touching Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which account for about half the budget but are the Holy Trinity of the entitlement state.
A bigger mystery is where Mr. Conrad's $2 trillion in new taxes are supposed to come from. Democrats don't even count the $700 billion from allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for those earning more than $200,000 a year, and which are already built into the Congressional Budget Office baseline after 2012. The Washington Post reports that Senate Democrats were set to propose a three percentage point income tax surcharge, which would make a farce of Democratic promises not to raise tax rates above the Bill Clinton-era rates. But that would raise only a fraction of the $2 trillion, even on static-revenue grounds that assumed no damage to the economy and no income sheltering.
Majority Leader Harry Reid has tried to change the subject to raising taxes on oil companies, but that also yields a pittance and even three members of his own caucus refused to go along. Democrats have collided with the realities of arithmetic: If they want to raise $2 trillion in revenues, they have to raise taxes on the middle class. No wonder Mr. Conrad decided to bluff.
Both parties have dug the current fiscal hole, but the Democratic record during their four recent years of running Congress is truly calamitous. The nearby chart shows the growth of debt and spending since 2007 when Nancy Pelosi was elevated to House Speaker and Mr. Reid became Senate Majority Leader. On their watch the national debt more than doubled and annual spending rose by a little under $1 trillion. In a mere four years.
"It would be foolish for us to do a budget at this stage," Mr. Reid told the Los Angeles Times last Thursday. And as if to prove the point about Senate fecklessness, he carved out time yesterday to force a meaningless floor vote on Mr. Ryan's budget, which failed 40-57. Republicans then offered Mr. Obama's budget, which lost 0-97. Voters might conclude that it's foolish to keep electing Democratic Senators who won't do their job.
4b) GOP, get off your heels and attack Obamacare: House loss should put health law back on front burner
Andrea Tantaros
Republicans were dealt a devastating blow this week with the loss of a House seat in New York's 26th Congressional District, an area that had long been a GOP stronghold. In a development few expected, Democrat Kathy Hochul defeated the favorite, Republican Jane Corwin, in the special election. Although there was a spoiler third-party candidate, Jack Davis of the Tea Party, who siphoned off some GOP votes, the reason for the defeat largely rests on the issue that's sure to dominate the 2012 presidential race: Medicare.
From the moment that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) courageously unveiled his plan to reform the increasingly insolvent Medicare in April, Democrats have been using it as a weapon against the GOP. A political ad by the Agenda Project, a liberal advocacy group, went as far as to show a Ryan look-alike pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair off a cliff, ostensibly to demonstrate what his reforms would do to the elderly. How's that for rational debate, Mr. President?
It appears that Democrats have settled on their electoral strategy for 2012, and it has to do with pushing back forcefully on the movement to reform entitlements like Medicare. Plainly put, the left will argue that it is going to give you things while the right is going to take them away.
But this couldn't be more disingenuous. First, the social programs so beloved by the left are funded at least in part by borrowing from China, not to mention your own tax dollars - much of which could surely be put to better use in your own wallet. Secondly, the Republicans aren't ending Medicare. They are, in fact, trying to salvage it by letting seniors choose the plan that suits their needs best, and one that forces insurers to issue the best possible plans at the lowest possible prices, as they will be competing against other managed-care plans for business. It's called competition, and it's at the heart of the American way.
The GOP has a strong case to make, and it should be out there making it. But instead of defending Ryan's plan, they should be poking holes in Obamacare. Only then will the benefits of their alternative become clear to the American public.
Sure, some Republicans (aside from Ryan and a handful of others) are afraid that they will be shown giving Grandma the plunge. Tim Pawlenty, who just announced that he will run in 2012, has subtly but doubtlessly distanced himself from the Ryan plan in a speech to the libertarian Cato Institute. The less credible and less subtle Newt Gingrich cowardly called it "right-wing social engineering."
A much worse case of social engineering is Obamacare, which is already the law of the land and deserves all of the ire Republicans can muster. For example, Washington Democrats have cut $500 billion by stopping reimbursements to doctors and hospitals through Medicare Advantage. And what happens when you cut payments? Doctors stop treating Medicare patients.
Another part of their "reform" plan includes the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a 15-person rationing panel of unelected bureaucrats tasked with limiting costs per patient. That, again, will happen by cutting services and limiting treatments. Even many Democrats are opposed to this, as it will likely lead to rationing. So why aren't Republicans screaming about it from the rooftops?
What's more, the Medicare board of trustees, part of President Obama's own administration, bluntly acknowledges that Obamacare does nothing to solve the long term Medicare problem: "Without major changes in health care delivery systems, the prices paid by Medicare for health services are very likely to fall increasingly short of the costs of providing these services. By the end of the long-range projection period, Medicare prices for hospital, skilled nursing facility, home health, hospice, ambulatory surgical center, diagnostic laboratory and many other services would be less than half of their level under the prior law. Medicare prices would be considerably below the current relative level of Medicaid prices, which have already led to access problems for Medicaid enrollees, and far below the levels paid by private health insurance."
So there you have it. Paul Ryan tries to come up with a serious solution and he takes it on the chin; Obama, meanwhile, is the one who should be taken to task for trying to pay for a giant new entitlement - Obamacare - by foisting cuts on seniors.
In the wake of Corwin's loss, it's imperative that Republicans speak truth to power and put the Democrats back on the defensive. Instead of retreating, they need to reframe this debate by retuning to the real issue at hand: The repeal of Obamacare. If Republicans don't, they will lose the message war, lose the election and our health care system will find itself falling off that cliff.
Andrea Tantaros, whose column appears on Thursdays on NYDailyNews.com and often in the print edition of the newspaper, is a political commentator as well as a corporate communications executive. She previously served as a senior adviser on a number of political campaigns, as communications director for former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld and Rep. Thomas Reynolds (R-N.Y.) and on Capitol Hill as press secretary for Republican leadership. Tantaros lives in New York City.
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